Tag Archives: science communication

Growing up, I was a dancer – I performed in salsa, swing, and ballroom competitions, trained a little in ballet, and was the captain of my high school dance team. When I went off to college to study physics and math, I never imagined that I would get to bring science and dance together someday.

But in 2017, when I was selected for a science/art residency aboard a ship in the Arctic, my roommate for three weeks in close quarters was Deidre Cavazzi, a choreographer specializing in interdisciplinary dance projects. Deidre was a wonderful companion on the journey we shared, and is now a good friend, so I was delighted when she suggested that she might be able to come to Ireland during her next sabbatical to choreograph a dance piece based on my research in nanoscience. I felt really honoured, because I had seen her previous work based on things like the Fibonacci sequence and banned books and to me, the idea of translating these ideas into physical movement and shape and tempo was fascinating.

So it was very exciting when Deidre came to Galway in autumn 2018, supported by a public engagement grant from the Institute of Physics. She came to my lab, talked with me about my research, and read everything she could get her hands on about nanoelectronics and memristors and novel devices that are mimicking the brain. We got a beautiful venue courtesy of the Discipline of Drama, Theatre, and Performance at NUI Galway, and then for two nights during Science Week we invited people to a free event where I gave a short introduction to nanoscience, and then Deidre introduced a dance theatre piece that explored the same concepts, with images from my research and movement choreographed and set to music by Deidre. The full show was recorded, and you can watch it here:

Video of my talk and the dance performance that Deidre created.

One of the best things for me about this project was that Deidre asked me if I wanted to be one of the dancers! I had a wonderful time, and seeing how she brought nanoscience concepts to a whole new context was truly inspiring. You can read more about Deidre’s process on her blog here, where she describes her process and her time in Ireland. I enjoyed my collaboration with her so very much, and we are hoping to repeat it again sometime in the future! But I couldn’t actually sum up the project better than this quote, from one of our audience members:

The scientist and the choreographer had understood each other so well… I loved the blending of science and art, I think both can benefit hugely from each other as each has a unique perspective but are trying to answer similar questions.

I’m American, but have done most of my science communication in Ireland and the UK. That’s pretty much a fluke, a result of the fact that I didn’t have the time or confidence to pursue science communication during graduate school, and that the timing of my move to Ireland coincided with an explosion of opportunities – Soapbox Science, Pint of Science, Famelab, and of course Bright Club – for talking about science.

That means I do a lot of my science communication outside of the culture and educational system I grew up in, which can be a challenge. References, attitudes, and even just ways of talking about science are different in different places, and most places are pretty different from the science town where I grew up: Los Alamos, New Mexico.

I’ve been working with scientists in Nairobi, Kenya, to challenge myself even more. The Institute of Physics have funded me to work with the Mawazo Institute twice now, a research institute which funds and trains female African scholars in science and social science policy-relevant disciplines. I’ve helped them put on public-facing events, connect to local universities and informal science educators, and most recently returned to Nairobi to run a full day course about effective communication of research.

Working with the amazing Mawazo Fellows in Nairobi.

On my science communication walkabout, here are some of the things I’ve learned:

Metaphors are great but they may not translate. See for example, all my baseball and basketball metaphors (it’s a home run! a slam dunk!) that I left back in the US.

The slang of where you grew up is as much a sort of jargon as scientific terminology can be. Change how you talk, or at least define your terms.

How direct and emotive a communicator your audience expects may vary wildly between different places! This can work to your advantage or disadvantage, but at the very least you have to be aware of it.

Also consider the level of formality your audience expects, and be conscious about your choice to match or subvert it as this can have different meanings across cultural divides. My personal style as well as my nationality is less formal than lots of the places I end up speaking, and I have to think about what cues I can use to show I’m worth listening to.

And finally, consider how fast you talk! You may have been told to slow down when doing public speaking in the past, to be easily understood, but consider that fast talking will compound when people aren’t familiar with your accent (even in a country speaking your native language).

It’s a tough feeling when you move somewhere new, or go on an exciting trip to talk about science, and suddenly realise that in this new context you are not the effective communicator that you were back home. But I think that most of the skills we develop by talking about science are transferable, it just takes some thought and attention to the new context. And as always, know your audience!

We all have heroes, people we look up to and whose achievements spur us on to do our own personal best. And, especially in this era where women are saying #metoo and finally being heard, we have probably all had the experience of finding out that one of our heroes has done some less than heroic things. This has come up a lot for me recently with the deaths of some very famous scientists and science fiction writers, men I greatly admired when I was a kid, who I’m now discovering were frequently awful to women (i.e., people like me).

I think this happens more than usual in science, a traditionally male-dominated field where a culture of elitism and privilege has been embedded for a long time. And it’s tempting to view things in black and white: either my hero is amazing for their achievements or they are garbage for their behaviour. We know in our personal lives that people are multi-faceted, yet we’re slow to allow public figures that same understanding. If a famous male scientist discovers lots of things, and is a great collaborator with other men but acts differently toward women, consciously or unconsciously, how are we meant to think about that?

As a physicist who loves to write, I’ve had to consider this before, because one of my early science heroes was Richard Feynman. Feynman was a brilliant theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate, and worked on the Manhattan project building the atomic bomb in my hometown of Los Alamos. He also wrote a series of very enjoyable popular science books, which were also quite personal and effortlessly engaging. A quote from an interview that immediately stuck with me:

Omni: As we came back to the office, you stopped to discuss a lecture on color vision you’ll be giving. That’s pretty far from fundamental physics, isn’t it? Wouldn’t a physiologist say you were ‘poaching’?

Feynman: Physiology? It has to be physiology? Look, give me a little time and I’ll give a lecture on anything in physiology. I’d be delighted to study it and find out all about it, because I can guarantee you it would be very interesting. I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

As someone who is omnivorous about knowledge, I found that quote resonated with me deeply. Science is fascinating because it shows us how the world works, how things which might appear separate are deeply connected, and the overlapping intricacies behind the everyday we take for granted. I now do my research on nanoscience, a strongly interdisciplinary field that draws from chemistry, electrical engineering, materials science, and plenty more beyond the physics that I got my degrees in. I admired Feynman for not letting other people dictate the questions he could ask, for being a physicist in what felt like a subversive and wide-ranging way. He was also famous for his sense of humour, his love of non-scientific things like playing bongos, and for generally not being as formal and rigid about anything as physicists tend to be.

The author having a Feynman bongo moment at the No-Ball Prizes. Photo by Ian Bowkett.

Of course, if you read Feynman’s books you’ll also find less inspiring stories, if you are a female scientist. He writes about doing his calculations in a Hooters, negging women in bars, and pretending to be an undergraduate to pick up grad students’ wives. This is less subversive, and more what we might generously call ‘of a time’. Feynman did plenty to promote the status of women in physics, encouraging his own sister to study it and eventually get a PhD. But reading through these differing accounts of his behaviour, female physicists are left wondering whether this great man of science would have seen them as colleagues and equals, or as prey.

I still find a lot in Feynman to look up to, as a physicist who did amazing work but cared about communication and didn’t give in to pressure to conform. However I can still acknowledge the women he mistreated, or perhaps even drove out of the field which is a terrible loss to science. He had a complexity to him, and my initial hero-worship of Feynman when I was younger has been replaced by equally complex feelings, of respect for his scientific and communication work alongside frustration at his mistreatment of women. But there’s no such thing as a perfect hero anyway, and if I needed one in physics, I might be waiting a long time. We have many historical women in physics to look up to, like Lise Meitner or Emmy Noether, and yet often these women were denied resources and opportunities that their male colleagues had, which can make them feel like amazing but also tragic figures. I would hope that women working in science today can be heroic without the tragedy.

Perhaps looking for heroes in science is a fundamentally flawed endeavor. Science is at its heart collaborative, and the sheer scope of human knowledge means that it is impossible for one person, toiling alone, to conquer it all. We must talk to each other, work together, and build on existing work, as famously stated by Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The great man theory is as flawed when it comes to science as it is when it comes to history. We all seek out role models, but we must recognize that they worked with others, seen and unseen, and that science is a societal effort and not the work of a lone genius.

While Feynman is long gone, there are other scientists still living, still contributing, and still behaving badly. It’s important that we not let them off the hook. Feynman lived decades ago, and certainly the standards of behaviour were different then, but today’s harassers and discriminators have no such excuse. If science is truly a collaborative effort, then it loses strength every time a person is pushed out of science by harassment. We can have complicated feelings about prominent scientists of the past, but there are a lot of people working in science today who are doing it right, and can serve as inspirations.

For example, tomorrow is the first ever LGBT STEM day, being celebrated with events around the world. Our Irish LGBT STEM network, House of STEM, has done so much to organise and promote this event, and founder Shaun O’Boyle explains why it’s desperately needed here:

The past is full of problematic yet successful scientists. Yet I’m hopeful that the future will have a broader array of amazing scientists, working together, who are also amazing people.

Comedy is a tool for change. It changes how people think about the world we live in, about complex ideas, and about each other. In this talk from TEDxTUM this winter, I explain why comedy is a great way to communicate science, to foster new ways of thinking, and even to show our humanity during the toughest times.

I’m very proud of this talk and I hope you enjoy it. It’s dedicated to my father.

The Royal Society’s Partnership Scheme is a funding opportunity for UK schools to work in partnership with a practicing STEM professional. Intended to fund projects with an investigative bent and a clear goal to benefit pupils it sounds pretty ideal, doesn’t it?

However, part of the project eligibility criteria states:

Projects must demonstrate an appropriate level of innovation and therefore not be part of continuous project schemes and established outreach programmes.

At first glance this might seem reasonable – innovation is good, right? But the implications that established projects can’t be innovative is actually quite confusing. What’s more, it’s criteria like this that leaves so many otherwise great projects floundering after the first year, unable to ‘bed in’ and establish themselves as anything other than a flash in the pan.

Further down in the judging criteria it states simply that they are looking for ‘sustainability’. Clearly these projects need to have a plan to exist beyond the initial set-up for them to be of use to the communities they’re intended for. And yet without funding to continue the good work a project’s cost must be absorbed by the partners or it will die.

You can’t even re-apply to the Partnership Grant to continue your scheme without changing it somehow. If your investigation takes longer than you thought, engages the students so much that they want to continue with it or requires additional time because of internal or external factors, too bad.

Previous recipients of a Partnership Grant may apply for further funding, as long as the new application is made one year or more after the previous application. All applicants must ensure that the new project is not a simple extension of the previous one and must involve a new investigation.

One of my most exciting and successful partnerships has been growing since 2013. While the project itself has maintained the same aims and content we have been able to slowly build from engaging one after-school club to two primary school classes and finally to our ultimate goal of working with five primary school classes and their feeder secondary school beginning next year. Without the scope to slowly grow this partnership and learn as we went along we never would have reached this point, and I’m sure that’s true of many successful partnerships. The STEM professionals need time to prove themselves trustworthy and capable, and their community partners need to embed the projects within their many other commitments and pulls on their time.

Funders need to understand that partnership working and high quality projects take time. Refusing to consider applications from established projects hurts both those projects and the ones that are successfully funded, for they are soon to become the established programmes now ineligible for further money. Let’s have a culture of support that recognises the need for long-term projects and puts its money where its mouth is when it talks about sustainability.

Practice makes perfect, with science communication as with most other things. The more you hone your skills, especially in front of an audience, the more you learn what works and what doesn’t. And this is the best time of year if you are looking for science communication opportunities in Ireland.

The author at Bright Club Galway, photo courtesy Steve Cross.

Right now all of the following opportunities are open for submissions:

Some of these events are recurring and some are once a year, and there’s also more competitions like I’m A Scientist, Get Me Out of Here which occurs in the fall. You may feel more drawn to some of these formats than others, but in my view any practice is valuable. The first couple years I started to do scicomm talks in earnest, I did ALL the events listed above. Except since Bright Club didn’t yet exist in Ireland, I had to start it myself.

It turned out pretty well, and I’ve gotten lots more opportunities and even career advancement since. So take a risk, register for one of the events above. Or all of them. You never know.

Over the summer I spent some time on a ship at the end of the world, as part of a science/art residency in the Arctic Circle. It was such a unique experience, and a visceral reminder of the many ways we are changing the world we live in. But I also took some videos while I was there, the first time I have marked an experience this way. While I love to take photos and find them very evocative, I was surprised how videos can bring back the immediacy of an experience like this, a reminder of the power of video for scientific communication too.

Now that I’ve finished processing them, here are all of my video missives from the Arctic, so that you can share the experience with me. And, if you are an artist or scientist and think this trip sounded amazing, you can apply for the same program here to go next year!